Yes, great. But if you are not able to get news coverage about your problem, then you are out of luck?
Yeah, sorry, Google. I once trusted you, but now I am migrating away from everything Google (except search).
Yeah, sorry, Google. I once trusted you, but now I am migrating away from everything Google (except search).
I ran a website that got our AdSense account shut down for what Google claimed was invalid clicks. I never clicked on our ads and we made little money from AdSense (we had other ad networks). Since my personal Gmail account was used as a backup email my personal account's AdSense account was also banned. They won't reinstate either account or give any more details.
I don't use any Google Cloud services because I'm afraid that all of my accounts would get shut down for any reason and I would lose all of that data.
That happened a number of years ago and I haven't had them kill any of my other accounts for any reason, but it remains a concern and I certainly don't trust them.
Just like hotels factor in the price and rate of stolen towels when pricing their rooms for everyone, Google, like any other business, makes money from some of te customers and loses money on others. We don't get to pick only the winning horses. Your grocery store doesn't ban you because you dropped a dozen eggs and then left with a 10¢ stick of gum - they price it in.
I strongly disagree with that notion. Even if you know in advance who will be profitable, you often gain more customers by servicing all customers (or at least the vast majority).
Two examples:
1. A lot of internet companies are built on servicing everyone, and extracting money from a tiny subset (github is one example).
2. If one in every thousand customers costs me more in support than they pay, that's one thing. But becoming known for good support will be more profitable than becoming known for kicking customers who ask too many questions.
The cost for support is low too, relatively speaking. Obviously not all businesses have enough margin to consider this, some support is more expensive than others etc.
The problem is when you accept customers and then don't provide proper service.
They could require $1k or $10k per month minimum volume. But they don't. They accept everyone and then stonewall at random, sometimes even when people are high-volume.
Then, there is a set of guidelines you have to comply, which is great, except it says this "Pages generated to funnel visitors into the actual usable or relevant portion of your site" and also says you can't copy content from other sites, they are basically describing Google search page.
who watches the watchmen?
They obviously provide a good service with Google search, that's out of discussion.
Google search quality has dropped drastically. Any attempt to look up a technical issue results in StackOverflow inconsistently in the top 5, with maybe 20 different shitty mirror sites.
Google has lost their magic. I'm actively migrating away from their services at this point.
Are you logged in? Maybe their learnt wrong things about you? (For me swiftkey has that problem, had to switch away from it as the more it learnt, the worse the suggestions would become)
Search is the one thing I still need from google. Technical things result in 50% stackoverflow and 50% blog posts or forum posts of people discussing the same problem. For things with multiple meanings google usually gets the right one. I'd love to use DDG, but whenever I try it, I end up having to use bangs to get what I want.
#1 rule when you get as large as Google is not to burn your users trust. This was about a big of a screw-up as you could do there. You should keep your different services separate and isolated and only ban in the areas of business where it impacts things negatively.
It's as if some person kicked out of a store for shoplifting swore they'd never shop there ever again. Good!
For this story in particular did anyone come forward to say that they had been banned that didn't participate in the scalping scam?
There's a culture of impunity out there on the internet were people think they can cheat the system and nothing will ever come it (think manufactured spending for example). Well, sometimes something does come of it. Don't do the crime, if you can't do the time.
If there is email abuse, then you ban from gmail, youtube abuse, from youtube, etc.
In the case of AdSense that may be true but there's no evidence here that anyone was falsely accused.
People scalped. People got busted. That's it. The only "problem" is that some of the scalpers were stupid enough to use their real accounts.
Google should put in place a better solution to deal with frauds. They have the resources, not the will apparently.
Their customer service sucks big.
That said, if you as a company are going to completely destroy someone's online life over a single incident, then it's totally fair for others to be weary of using your services.
I think I will be concerned to enter that shop again.
It'd be like losing your voting rights due to getting a speeding ticket.
Google is technically right here but the reason you're seeing such a visceral reaction is that people care about their data a lot and having a relatively unrelated event wipe that out is a big overreach.
One time I had a question, I was able to use the web interface to request support, and a real human called me back in 10 minutes. It wasn't a very complex question, so I can't say if he was super knowledgeable, but he certainly seemed like he knew the platform, and was able to answer my question in just a few minutes.
Oh, and I know this is a throwaway account, but I'm not a shill for MS. This is just my personal experience with O365, and YMMV - it's worked well enough for me.
Heck, I could run my own mail server if I wanted (been there, don't want to go there again, but could if I really HAD to).
Of course, I only have one account (lastname@personaldomain.com) and therefore didn't have to deal with setting up multiple users, migrating data etc. I also set up 2FA for my account.
I did all this over one weekend (from looking at different providers, to signing up for O365, configuring etc), and haven't had to touch anything since. The only question I had was related to billing (I went from a month-to-month to a yearly account) and that was answered quickly by a real human being.
You can always use !g interobang if you want to search google
Plus you still have to type "bookmark" <wait> "search"
Often it is good, sometimes better than Google but in some settings I too use !g frequently. I still try to use it without !g first to give some search traffic to ddg.
I hope they can use the data to improve future searches.
My cloud storage has always been Dropbox, it's always been great.
I backup my cloud storage (and disk storage) with Arq.
Also, DuckDuckGo?
Yes, I agree it's a scary thought, I will automatically takeout my data and keep personal backups, but let's be honest here, those people in my opinion very well deserved what they got. You can't shit on someone's lawn and expect them to welcome you in their house.
Citation needed. In the past decade, tech companies have managed to perpetuate the toxic notion that they can attach strings to your physical purchases. Despite their aspirations, legally you are free to do as you like with a physical product once you legally purchase it.
> You can't shit on someone's lawn and expect them to welcome you in their house.
Pets do exactly this, so if any company treats people like property, they shouldn't be surprised by those people's behavior in response.